Thursday, June 1, 2017

Is another big data ransomware apocalypse on the horizon?

Last year, thousands of MongoDB instances were hacked, and their contents ransomed for a small sum in bitcoin. This episode wasn’t just a troubling reminder that people are terrible at securing the things they expose to the Internet, but a demonstration that ransomware developers were shifting their focus from systems to services. Could another big data ransomware nightmare be on the horizon? Perhaps. Shodan, which develops the “search engine for computers,” just published an interesting article that suggests the bad practices that resulted in MongoDB systems getting pwned are still prevalent. According to Shodan-founder John Matherley, there are 4,487 HDFS (Hadoop…